Sep 11, 2023 · Megan Hoetger with Samia Henni and Patrice Bouveret
Curatorial note
Exposure
Between 1960 and 1966 the French colonial regime detonated four atmospheric atomic bombs, thirteen underground nuclear bombs and conducted other nuclear experiments in the Algerian Sahara, whose natural resources were being extracted. France’s secret nuclear weapons programme occurred during and after the Algerian Revolution, or the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). The contamination of the Sahara resulting from France’s imposed toxic imprints and irrevocable nuclear blasts spread radioactive fallout across Algeria, North, Central and West Africa, and the Mediterranean (including southern Europe), causing irreversible contaminations among human and non-human bodies, natural and built environments.
The historical details and ongoing impacts of this nuclear history remain largely unexposed, tenaciously hidden by the French state behind a wall of red ink ‘top-secret’ stamps. The ‘official’ archive is, thus, mostly marked by its holes, breaks and absences. Performing Colonial Toxicity weaves a speculative narrative built around the resulting gaps, redactions and low threshold copies, exposing the toxicity of the norms and forms of France’s atomic technologies and infrastructures, including their current archival, spatial, environmental, political and social impacts. In so doing, it explores the relationships and intersections between performativity, bodies, radioactivity, coloniality, war and violence. After the toxification of the Sahara, France moved its nuclear weapons testing from Algeria to another territory under French rule: the Mururoa and Fangataufa atolls in colonized Tahiti Nui (French Polynesia), in the southern Pacific Ocean. Despite objections and protests, the French colonial authorities conducted nearly 200 atmospheric and underground nuclear experiments there between 1966 and 1996, further toxifying colonized environments.
Testimonies
For the Testimony Translation Project, a selection of testimonies is being made digitally available in their original French (and, in some cases in French translation from Tamazight), as well as in English translations. The witness accounts span a range of voices, including fifteen Algerian voices (from Saharan inhabitants that worked at either the atomic base in Reggane or In Ekker, and from their extended family and community networks) and twenty-eight French voices (military and civilian personnel stationed in one of the two French bases). These accounts are drawn from three sources. The largest group of testimonies comes from the Lyon-based anti-nuclear NGO Observatoire des armements with whose co-founder, Patrice Bouveret, Henni has remained in dialogue throughout her research process. The Observatoire has, from its founding, stood as a witness to France’s nuclear detonation programmes, supporting the struggle to have them acknowledged by the state and, with that, to attempt to secure proper medical access and environmental clean-up. To this end, since the late 1990s, they have worked in close collaboration with the Association des vétérans des essais nucléaires français et leur familles (AVEN, or Association of the Veterans of the French Nuclear Tests and their Families), creating a massive collection of around six hundred pages of handwritten and typed eye-witness testimonies from French military and civilian victims in the Algerian Sahara.
Alongside the materials from the Observatoire sit two additional groups of interviews, these with Algerian atomic victims. The first comes from the French politician and activist Solange Fernex who travelled to the Sahara and conducted interviews in the early 1990s while sitting as Agriculture Commissioner for the European Parliament. The materials from Fernex shared in the Studio include accounts from seven anonymous individuals, as well as general descriptions of personnel numbers, base infrastructure, and evacuation measures. The second of these groups of interviews come from Algerian photographer Bruno Hadjih who has, since the early 2010s, been having conversations with residents of Mertoutek, a town in the Sahara nearby In Ekker where the underground nuclear bomb detonations took place. From the audio recorded dialogues, Hadjih had eight interviews transcribed and edited, which were later commissioned for translation from Tamazight to French as part of the Testimony Translation Project. Some of Hadjih’s materials were also used in the 2013 documentary At(h)ome by filmmaker Élisabeth Leuvrey.
The Testimony Translation Project
The aim of the Testimony Translation Project within Henni’s Performing Colonial Toxicity is three-fold: first, to begin making these materials available for open digital access; second, to begin the long-term project of their digitalization, as well as their translation into English, allowing for searchability and broader transmission globally; and, third, to begin to build a broad network of “translator-participants”—that is, of people who are not professional translators, but, instead, come from across academic, artistic and activist spheres with practices staked in French and/or Algerian history. Given the intentionally expanded nature of Henni’s Testimony Translation Project, these are non-professional translations done by colleagues and comrades with only a light editorial process, which can hopefully underscore the urgency of getting these important documents circulating.
As a kind of prologue to the exhibition and publication, the online Testimony Translation Project makes public for the first time these testimonies, marking an important moment of exposure of this history and beginning the crucial process of disseminating knowledge about it.
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About Samia Henni
Samia Henni (b. 1980, Algiers, Algeria. Lives in Zurich, Switzerland) is an architectural historian, exhibition maker and educator. Working through textual and visual strategies, her practice interrogates histories of the built, destroyed and imagined environment—those produced by processes and mechanisms of colonisation, forced displacement, nuclear weapons, resource extraction and warfare. Henni’s research has culminated in the award-winning book Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria (gta Verlag, 2017, EN; Editions B42, 2019, FR) and Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara (If I Can’t Dance, edition fink, 2023), as well as in the edited volumes War Zones, gta papers no. 2 (gta Verlag, 2018) and Deserts Are Not Empty (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022); and in exhibitions including Archives: Secret-Défense? (ifa Gallery/SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, 2021), Housing Pharmacology (Manifesta 13, Marseilles, 2020) and Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria (Zurich, Rotterdam, Berlin, Johannesburg, Paris, Prague, Ithaca, Philadelphia, and Charlottesville, 2017–22). Currently, Henni is an invited guest professor at the Institute for the History and theory of Architecture, ETH Zurich. She has taught at Cornell University, Geneva University of Art and Design, Princeton University, and the University of Zurich.
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About The Observatoire des armements
The Observatoire des armements was created in 1984 in Lyon, under the name of Center for Documentation and Research on Peace and Conflicts (CDRPC), the Observatoire aims to support the work of civil society on questions of defense and security, with a view to progressive demilitarization. The Observatoire is both an independent center of expertise and information, in particular through its publications, website and journal Damoclès; and a tool for mediation and action in the context of opinion campaigns and relations with public authorities. The documentation includes around 6,000 works, around a hundred subscriptions to journals, thematic files as well as archives of the peace movement (posters, internal bulletins). Its desire is to promote a policy of transparency and democratic control over the military activities of France and Europe.
www.obsarm.info
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About About Solange Fernex
Solange Fernex (b. Strasbourg, FR, 1934; d. Biederthal, FR, 2006) was a committed figure in the French and European political landscapes for nearly thirty years. Having begun her career in 1977 in the municipal government of her by-then hometown Biederthal, France, she went on, in 1984, to be a co-founder of the French national Green Party. Later, from 1989 until 1994, she represented the party in the European Parliament. Throughout the 1990s and up until her death, she also helped to establish and/or to lead several different anti-nuclear and anti-violence initiatives, including the Stop essais! organization against nuclear testing; the Women’s International League for Peace, Freedom; and the International Peace Bureau. As one among the first wave of ecologist members of the European Parliament and as sitting chair of the Agricultural Committee in the early 1990s, Fernex was one of the first Europeans to go to Algeria and collect testimonies from the inhabitants of the Sahara. Her work has contributed enormously to that of NGOs like the Observatoire des armements.
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About About Bruno Hadjih
Bruno Hadjih was born in Kabylia, Algeria. He lives and works between Paris, the Gers and the Sahara. After studying sociology, Hadjih focused on documentary and visual photography, with a particular interest in the redefinition of spaces described as intangible, mental, and geographical. For more than twenty-one years, he has been working on Sufism. His work has been exhibited in various museums and festivals, including the BNF, CCCB Barcelona, Museum-Herzilia, Museum of the African Diaspora (MOAD) San Francisco, Visa pour l'image, African Biennale of Photography in Bamako, Biennale of World Photography Arab. His films include At(h)ome (2013), Wird (2020) and Ziara (2020).